Welcome to the second of our developer logs on Ambrosia Sky! In this initial series of dev logs, we’ll dive deeper into certain aspects of Ambrosia Sky, Soft Rains’ first-person clean ’em up game about exploring an agricultural colony in the rings of Saturn that has been devastated by an alien fungal crisis.
In Ambrosia Sky, you play as Dalia, a disaster clean-up specialist known as a Scarab. Scarabs are a loose outfit of self-trained scientists, whose specialties are a blend of biology, engineering, and religious mysticism. This blend of focus and specialties informs Dalia’s perspective and how she interacts with the world around her. Scarabs get sent to sample the DNA of people who have recently died in strange or biohazardous scenarios. Their job is to both lay the dead to rest and clean up the potentially contaminated environment in which they died.
Early concept art from art director Adam Volker exploring the moment of Dalia beginning a Death Rite.
As sci-fi analogues to real-world “bio cleaners”- people who are sent into places to clean up after people have died - Scarabs prioritize care in their job. They are not sent here to save anybody, nor are they soldiers; they are mortuary scientists whose job is to catalogue and to clean, to restore a space to working order and to respectfully say goodbye to the dead. Inspired in part by my previous writing work on A Mortician’s Tale, as well as other media like Annihilation (both the book and the movie, for different reasons), and real-world experiences, Scarabs represent a hidden job that focuses on care and community, but is extrapolated into a sci-fi setting.
But what exactly is a Scarab? Scarabs are mystical field scientists whose job revolves around the dead. Founded when humanity first ventured into the galaxy, Scarabs seek out death in the universe to understand the effects the cosmos has on human bodies. What kills us? Why? And can we harness this knowledge to stop cellular decay? The answer to these questions informs the basis of The Ambrosia Project.
The Ambrosia Project
Screenshot of Dalia coming upon Gerald Parker, an older man she remembers from her youth, who has consented to be part of the Ambrosia Project.
A common maxim unites Scarabs: understanding death in space is the key to protecting human life amongst the stars. This is known as the Ambrosia Project, a collective effort to research a panacea that can prevent cellular death and decay in humans. In effect: immortality. It is a Scarab’s most important creed.
Throughout the project, particularly in its early stages, we conducted extensive research to establish our world. Due to the Cluster’s agricultural setting, we conducted extensive research into NASA’s existing efforts to grow and cultivate crops in space. But I also jumped into the deep end of immortality research, or, more mundanely, anti-aging research. What was the existing thought on life extension, from a cellular level? We didn’t want the Scarabs to be pursuing the elixir of life or some magical substance that can be consumed; we wanted them to think concretely about cellular decay and how life in the galaxy affects and could interfere with our cellular growth and death. This led us to consider telomere extension, examining NASA’s Twin Study to investigate the impact of outer space on our DNA and bodies, as well as delving into gene editing. It was fun! It was weird. The research made me start lifting heavier weights and eating more cauliflower.
To progress the Ambrosia Project, Scarabs are sent to investigate deaths in the universe. Because Scarabs’ research requires taking large swaths of cellular samples from recently deceased individuals that occur in a variety of environments (to study protein interactions), Scarabs, by necessity, have to be nomadic. They go to lots of strange places, see how people died, and see what their deaths can teach us about our cells.
So when they are on a job, Scarabs’ priority is to take a sample of the deceased’s DNA to upload to the Ambrosia Project. After that is done, Scarabs perform a “bioremediation”, an organic act of cremating the remains via specialized spores. (A lot of Ambrosia Sky is also inspired by our team’s real-life experience foraging for fungus.) Importantly, Scarabs only perform death rituals on the deceased who have consented to having their DNA included in the Ambrosia Project, and who have passed within a 48-hour window.
In-game bioremediation VFX
When we first started thinking about the Scarabs, creative director Joel Burgess and I quickly realized that the Scarabs needed a motivation beyond their specific job, something that would compel individuals to leave their home colonies behind and to seek out dangerous places where people have died. We wanted to add a unique flavour to the Scarabs, making them feel haunted or feared by others. Adding a grandiose goal of seeking human immortality provided the additional element we were looking for. They became strange in addition to being scientific. In an early prototype, I wrote a line that described the Scarabs as “star witches,” a sort of cute in-world way to poke fun at the blend of science and spiritualism we wanted the Scarabs to embody. “Star witches” became an instant pillar, providing us with a coherent summary of what makes Scarabs who they are.
Medieval Medicine and Cosmic Folklore
Early explorations of what Scarab gear could look like, done by Carlos Ruiz.
I’ve always been somewhat obsessed with the concept of plague doctors and medieval medicine, and, importantly, how folklore influences medieval science. A big, compelling theme for us, as we think about sci-fi fantasy as a genre blend for Ambrosia Sky, revolves around the idea of what makes folklore so interesting, in the way that it’s people trying to make sense of something with the best information they have on hand. And we started thinking about what it would be like when we first truly start exploring and settling in the cosmos: what do we know, but more importantly, what don’t we yet know? And how would we experience those things that we don’t know, and what theories and stories would we devise about them to help us understand them?
This is where the plague doctor analogy came into play for me. Scarabs are scientific, but there’s a lot they wouldn’t know about how human bodies respond to prolonged life in the stars. So, they’re informed by real, proven scientific methods, but that gets blended with a folkloric approach to understanding the things they can’t yet grasp. It makes them a bit magical, a bit medieval in their thinking, grounded in what we know of science and death today.
Fortunately for us at Soft Rains, we have Fiona Jeeva, our associate technical artist, who is also a biochemist. Sure, I could read as many anti-aging books as I liked, but I was still finding the line between coherent and compelling, and Fiona was absolutely instrumental in not letting me get too far off the rails with this folklore-meets-scientific approach to the Scarabs.
Fiona then assigned me homework and articles to read, which I appreciated.
Concept of the flower that remains behind after the bioremediation is complete, an exploration of blending the scientific with the mystical of the Scarabs (credit: Adam Volker).
Working with Fiona on the Scarabs helped ground the grandiosity of the Scarabs into a scientific method. Particularly, we discussed extensively how the Scarabs sample the DNA of the corpses, what they are looking for, and how it would all work. Fiona’s why we discussed the role of environments in protein interactions. Fiona heard me say the word “telomeres” and asked me why I was interested in them. It was thanks to these conversations with Fiona that we developed the 48-hour rule for sampling human bodies: people who consent to the Ambrosia Project have to have their samples collected within 48 hours of their death, or the samples become non-viable.
Last Wills and Giving Voice to the Dead
Early sketch of Dalia’s emotional state after a Death Rite is completed by Adam Volker.
In Ambrosia Sky, the quest for immortality, known as the Ambrosia Project, manifests in the moments of laying the dead to rest, which we refer to as “Death Rites.” While scientific in approach (obtain the DNA sample needed to advance the Ambrosia Project), Death Rites are also highly intimate moments with the deceased. While performing a Death Rite, Dalia will listen to the deceased’s Last Will, a testimony that is recorded as proof of their consent to be included in the Ambrosia Project.
These Last Wills give voice to the dead, offering a range of perspectives on our own mortality as told through the eyes of somebody willing to donate their body to scientific research. Some are able to look at their own impending death straight on, others require humour and distance to accept their mortality, and others need to believe in something greater than themselves to be able to accept it. We really wanted these Last Wills to convey the different ways we all feel about and think about our own mortality. This is where a lot of the work I did writing for A Mortician’s Tale is really felt in Ambrosia Sky: both games strive to convey with compassion the different ways people respond to death, but with Ambrosia Sky, we wanted to have the opportunity to explore how we feel about our own death, rather than the death of our loved ones.
Each Death Rite is different, and each one affects Dalia in a different way, as some are people she’s known her whole life, and others are complete strangers.
Like the rest of Ambrosia Sky, even the identity of the Scarabs is a wonderful mixture of our team’s collective inspirations, experiences, and influences. And as Dalia’s job, Scarabs inform a lot about Ambrosia Sky, from the writing to the story to the gameplay. In a future dev log, we’ll dive deeper into the gameplay of Ambrosia Sky, exploring the details of how the Scarab job manifests in gameplay specifically.
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